Myle Tap

Wearable Voice Recorder

Myle Tap is a wearable voice recorder that can store spoken notes and pass information to smartphone applications or other connected devices.

The device is just over an inch square and clips to clothing or a bag strap. Like the famous Star Trek communicator badge, you just tap it and speak — in one of 42 languages recognized by the Universal Translator (in this case, the Nuance voice-to-text cloud service).

Save random thoughts and reminders; record fitness activity; make grocery lists — these are just a few things Myle promises to do by integrating with many of the most popular apps across the mobile ecosystems. And in the same way that the smartphone has become a multi-purpose remote control for other connected devices in one’s surroundings, Myle Tap become a powerful, unifying interface that puts the smart home, smart office or smart city at your beck and call.

Myle pairs with mobile devices over Bluetooth Low Energy, but also has ample internal memory to store several thousand short audio notes. Combined with battery life of up to a week per charge, that means you can use it without a phone, or off-network, and your notes will all be uploaded and processed as soon as connectivity returns.

If Myle seems to replicate a lot of what digital voice assistants like Siri and Google Now already offer, you’re not alone in thinking so. But the designers say Myle adds more than one-touch convenience. For one thing, it actually remembers things you’ve said before, instead of treating every interaction as a standalone event.

For another, they write, “Myle does not pretend to have a mind of its own and argue with you, nor it will endlessly ask for clarifications, distracting you and losing your precious time.” In other words, Myle’s user interface is designed to be as minimal as possible: you tap, it listens. Any actions after that take place automatically, while you get back to living your life.

That’s a big departure from Siri and Google Now, which frequently repeat what they’ve heard and ask for confirmation before sending messages or setting reminders — and whether Myle can be trusted to do these things without that extra bit of oversight will depend entirely on the reliability of Nuance’s voice recognition algorithms (which in turn may be affected by the quality of Myle’s microphone and other factors). The designers say that in testing, Myle has been up to 95 percent accurate, and it should adapt to each user’s voice to eventually get even higher.

Myle Tap can be preordered on Indiegogo through July 17, and is slated to ship at the end of 2015. Learn more in the video below.